Hannah Arendt. Aesthetics and Politics of Appearance

Appearance, form, common sense, taste, spectacle, performance are not, in Arendt’s view, simply ‘aesthetical ideas’ exported from aesthetics and applied to politics, but the very basis of her political theory. This thread can be proved and traced through a renewed reading Arendt’s principal works – from The Human Condition to The Life of the Mind, the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, The Origins of Totalitarism, On Revolution, Between Past and Future and several other writings, not forgetting the more recent Denktagebuch – in search of her conception of the world as a ‘space of appearing’, where aesthetic, performative, political events interweave with biological aspects.